The NextDesign Leadership Institute was created out of the need for the design discipline to address the changing business climate. They will target design eduction and graduate programs to begin preparing future designers to develop more robust problem-solving capabilities needed in the design marketplace.
NextD is discipline agnostic and focused primarily on HOW (Process) rather than WHAT (Content). We work at the level of foundational pattern language for problem solving. That language and the interconnected toolkit can be adapted to any problem condition. Knowledge of that pattern language can inform all specialized problem solving process types, including Industrial Design, Communication Design, Environmental Design, Experience Design, eBusiness Design, Organizational Systems Design, Strategy Design, etc.
Link:
http://www.nextd.org/front.html